Pest Management Professional, June 2016

photo istock com stockRocket Mobile pmp By Matt Beckwith Contributor Did you get the text A t a time when social media and smartphone applications seem to dominate the conversation around customer contact and engagement strategy customers are busy with good oldfashioned texting Is your company taking advantage of person to person text messaging A Pew Research Center study conducted in 2015 showed texting is the most widely and frequently used feature on a smartphone with 97 percent of Americans texting at least once a day To read the full study visit PewInternet org 2015 04 01 us smartphone use in 2015 A customer support preference study conduct by HeyWire Business in 2014 found that 89 percent of respondents report it is important to have different options such as phone email text and chat for customer support To read the full study visit eWeek com networking consumers like using text messages tosolve customer service issues html At Clark Pest Control we are always looking at new technologies in the pursuit of improving communication with our customers We have deployed a robust contact center telephone solution and live web chat In addition to the phone and live chat existing and potential customers can email us or complete a form on our website In late 2014 we introduced person to person text messaging on one of our most publicized tollfree numbers Without even advertising this to our customers we started receiving text messages right away In fact the first customer to text us wanted to add an additional service to her account Our customer just assumed she could text us Imagine finding out that customers and potential customers were calling you but you had no way of answering or even knowing that they were calling Thats where we were with texting As weve enabled texting on more of our phone numbers we have seen the same effect Customers have been texting us all along It seems that customers dont need to be told they can text us Many customers have our phone number saved in their phones and texting to a number already in their phones address book seems perfectly natural How does it work When a customer sends us a text message it is delivered to our team members in the office via their web browser Anyone on the team can respond follow along or step in to help if the first person who responded is away from the desk To the customer the experience is just like texting a person because thats exactly what it is a customer texting a person There are many solution providers that offer easyto use web based tools to view and BECKWITH is contact center director for Clark Pest Control Lodi Calif You can reach him at mbeckwith@ clarkpest com respond to texts and most providers can text enable your business number within a day or sooner Like most pest management companies our phones and our phone numbers are our lifelines We wouldnt be in business without them we want our phones to ring Its easy to text enable your existing and already publicized phone numbers Plus you can maintain the voice routing of your calls and you dont even need to change your telecom carrier So what are you waiting for Customers may already be texting your business Are you there to respond when they do Dont let another customer slip away PMP 100 June 2016 Pest Management Professional mypmp net